June 2020 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Won't Someone Please Think of the Archives (Re: My #OpDeathEaters review)
by grarpamp 04 Jun '20

04 Jun '20

On 6/1/20, Douglas Lucas <dal(a)riseup.net> wrote: > Due to high traffic, my website has been going up and down > https://twitter.com/DouglasLucas/ > http://www.douglaslucas.com/ This site, among so many thousands others on thousand different subjects, and countless youtubes, such a works of freespeech, research, documentary, etc that they may be, yet they have few saves to archive.org... which itself will fall to rampant censorship very soon... some none at all, nor saved anywhere, nor conducive to mirroring, etc. Many to needlessly fall to void of entropy without having executed firm plans for potentially infinite re-ups. As such, as with all such works, authors should ensure that they regularly archive their sites and works into a single compressed file and post and distribute it for curation by public and private collections, and/or establish further rsyncs, or somesuch, as deemed worthy perhaps not merely by selves. Nor did cryptome respond to public query on same, beyond quiescent implication of prior disclaimer, a treatise questioned by some before.

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Censorship: ROKU Adds Itself to List of Untrustable Platforms
by grarpamp 04 Jun '20

04 Jun '20

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/2/21278342/roku-qanon-channel-ban-david-hay…

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Zoom Video Conferencing - Completely Untrustable, Falls to Government Surveillance Demands, keybase
by grarpamp 04 Jun '20

04 Jun '20

https://thenextweb.com/security/2020/06/03/zoom-wont-encrypt-free-calls-bec… https://www.wired.com/story/zoom-keybase-godaddy-breach-ransomware-nest-sec… https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/05/07/zoom-acquires-keybase-and-announc… https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_(software) Zoom recently bought some cryptosec sellout called Keybase.io (which btw was started by Chris Coyne and Max Krohn, the same sellout duo that sold out and wrecked OKCupid over to Match/IAC which owns many other fuckall spy and peoplemining garbage piles), ostensibly to fix Zoom's right fucked up system. Now Zoom removes all guise of crypto from free unpaid (anon) calls presumably due to Government pressure to surveillance spy the fuck out of Zoom's users, which it is giving away free to ensnare millions of more unwitting users worldwide. Expect any strong crypto services at keybase to get backdoored and wrecked over the next few years too. "for sure, we don’t want to give that [end-to-end encryption]." --Eric Yuan (Chinese National re any programmed favor spy regimes), meme rt by Alex Stamos (affil Google Facebook etc spy corps) Zoom has been criticized for "security lapses and poor design choices" that have resulted in heightened scrutiny of its software.[52][13] The company has also been criticized for its privacy and corporate data sharing policies.[53][54][55] Security researchers and reporters have criticized the company for its lack of transparency and poor encryption practices. Zoom initially claimed to use "end-to-end encryption" in its marketing materials,[56] but later clarified it meant "from Zoom end point to Zoom end point" (meaning effectively between Zoom servers and Zoom clients), which The Intercept described as misleading and "dishonest".[57] The video conferencing company boasts about end-to-end encryption on its website, and in a separate security-related white paper. However, The Intercept’s report found that the service uses transport encryption instead. In March 2020, New York State Attorney General Letitia James launched an inquiry into Zoom's privacy and security practices.[58] In April 2020, Citizen Lab researchers discovered that a single, server-generated AES-128 key is being shared between all participants in ECB mode, which is deprecated due to its pattern-preserving characteristics of the ciphertext.[66] During test calls between participants in Canada and United States the key was provisioned from servers located in mainland China where they are subject to the China Internet Security Law.[17] ...

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Re: [liberationtech] "The Nine Most Terrifying Words In The English Language", Pre-dates Reagan... (LT Digest, Vol 30, Issue 1)
by grarpamp 04 Jun '20

04 Jun '20

> There is a VERY SERIOUS need for societies to have critical questions relating to "common-futures" brought to the surface, pondered and answered. Given that meme's all been explored since eons with quite some deleterious effect upon rights, there is VERY OBVIOUSLY far more serious need to give at least equal, for the first time ever in history, to pondering the natural right of others to not be forced upon theft and death, to determine and live their "own-future", free from the force of such ponderers commons of thuggery upon them. > OUR concentrations (in multiple areas) ought to DRAMATICALLY > shift from maintaining a "Law and Order" focus, to that of "Human & > Individual RIGHTS" based orientations. Democracy's "law and order", more precisely its self serving and preserving created defined scheme of such, is based at its underlying fundamental core upon a) forcing other harmless people to do the bidding the majority whim that "vote" or otherwise decide or craft such powers for themselves over others (which is in fact a false authority concocted purely and wholly out of thin air), or b) be thieved prisoned killed by such power and die. Both of which are grave offensive sins upon "human and individual" rights. These two options are ultimately the sum total offered by democracy, no other options exist, and there is no fixing or modifying of this facts. Democracy is thus utterly incapable of recognizing and incorporating "human and individual rights"... as it considers those and all other considerations to be lesser moot concepts entirely disposable at will to its primary concerns and functions... its own illegitimate abusive force power over others such rights, self preserving its system. This is why every democracy in history, and every democracy in the future, has, and will, utterly run roughshod and fuck over "human and individual" rights. If you want to shift to based on human and individual... natural rights, you must shift away from democracy to a school of something else. For so long as people continue to deny these basic facts, that something else must be left for you to discover at such time as their brains opens to seeking it. Giving up forcing other humans to do your will, what you want, becoming that freedom, is terrifying task for most. Nor can there be any free commons until such time.

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New IP and Emerging Communications Technologies
by coderman 02 Jun '20

02 Jun '20

https://labs.apnic.net/?p=1318 """ A “New IP” framework was proposed to the ITU last year . This framework envisages a resurgence of a network-centric view of communications architectures where application behaviours are moderated by network-managed control mechanisms. It’s not the first time that we’ve seen proposals to rethink the basic architecture of the Internet’s technology (for example, there were the “Clean Slate” efforts in the US research community a decade or so ago) and it certainly won’t be the last. However, it this New IP framework is very prescriptive in terms of bounding application behaviours, and it seems to ignore the most basic lesson of the past three decades of evolution: communications services are no longer a command economy and these days the sector operates as a conventional market-based economy, and this market for diverse services is expressed in diversity of application behaviours. What this market-based economy implies is that ultimately what shapes the future of the communications sector, what shapes the services that are provided and even the technologies used to generate such services are the result of consumer choices. Consumers are often fickle, entranced by passing fads, and can be both conservative and adventurous at the same time. But whatever you may think of the sanity of consumer markets, it’s their money that drives this industry. Like any other consumer-focused services market, what consumers want, they get. However, it’s more than simple consumer preferences. This change in the economic nature of the sector also implies changes in investors and investment, changes in operators and changes in the collective expectations of the sector and the way in which these expectations are phrased. It’s really not up to some crusty international committee to dictate future consumer preferences. Time and time again these committees with their lofty titles, such as “the Focus Group on Technologies for Network 2030” have been distinguished by their innate ability to see their considered prognostications comprehensively contradicted by reality! Their forebears in similar committees missed computer mainframes, then they failed to see the personal computer revolution, and were then totally surprised by the smartphone. It’s clear that no matter what the network will look like some 10 years from now, what it won’t be is what this 2030 Focus Group pondering a new IP is envisaging! I don’t claim any particular ability to do any better in the area of divination of the future, and I’m not going to try. But in this process of evolution, the technical seeds of the near-term future are already visible today. What I would like to do here is describe that I think are the critically important technical seeds any why. This is my somewhat arbitrary personal choice of technologies that I think will play a prominent role in the Internet over the next decade. """ The foundation technology of the Internet, and indeed of the larger environment of digital communication, is the concept of packetization, replacing the previous model of circuit emulation. IP advocated a radical change to the previous incumbency of telephony. Rather than an active time switched network with passive edge devices, the IP architecture advocated a largely passive network where the network’s internal elements simply switched packets. The functionality of the service response was intended to be pushed out to the devices at the edge of the network. The respective roles of networks and devices were inverted in the transition to the internet. But change is hard and for some decades many industry actors with interests in the provision of networks and network services strived to reverse this inversion of the network service model. Network operators tried hard to introduce network-based service responses while handling packet-based payloads. We saw the efforts to develop network-based Quality of Service approaches that attempted to support differential service responses for different classes of packet flows within a single network platform. I think some twenty years later we can call this effort a Grand Failure. Then there was virtual circuit emulation in MPLS and more recently variants of loose source routing (SR) approaches. It always strikes me as odd that these approaches require orchestration across all active elements in a network where the basic functionality of traffic segmentation can be offered at far lower cost through ingress traffic grooming. But, cynically, I guess that the way to sell more fancy routers is to distribute complexity across the entire network. I would hesitate to categorise any of these technologies as emerging, as they seem to be more like regressive measures in many ways, motivated more by a desire to “value-add” to an otherwise undistinguished commodity service of packet transmission. The longevity of some of these efforts to create network-based services is a testament to the level of resistance of network operators to accept their role as a commodity utility, rather than any inherent value in the architectural concept of circuit-based network segmentation. At the same time, we’ve made some astonishing progress in other aspects of networking. We’ve been creating widely dispersed fault tolerant systems that don’t rely on centralised command and control. Any student of the inter-domain routing protocol BGP, which is has been quietly supporting the Internet for some three decades now, could not fail to be impressed by the almost prescient design of a distributed system for managing a complex network that is now up to nine orders of magnitude larger than the network of the early 1990’s for which is was originally devised. We’ve created a new kind of network that is open and accessible. It was nigh on impossible to create new applications for the telephone network, yet in the Internet that’s what happens all the time. From the vibrant world of apps down to the very basics of digital transmission the world of networking is in a state of constant flux and new technologies are emerging at a dizzying rate. What can we observe about emerging technologies that will play a critical role in the coming years? Here’s is my personal selection of recent technical innovations that I would classify into the set of emerging technologies that will exercise a massive influence over the coming ten years. Optical Coherence For many decades the optical world used the equivalent of a torch. There was either light passing down the cable or there wasn’t. This “on-off keying” (OOK) simple approach to optical encoding was continuously refined to support optical speeds of up to 10Gbps, which is no mean feat of technology, but at that point it was running into some apparently hard limitations of the digital signal processes that OOK is using. But there is still headroom in the fibre for more signal. We are now turning to Optical Coherence and have unleashed a second wave of innovation in this space. Exploiting Optical Coherence is a repeat of a technique that was been thoroughly exercised in other domains. We used phase-amplitude keying to tune analogue baseband voice circuit modems to produce 56Kbps of signal while operating across a 3Khz bandwidth carrier. Similar approaches were used in the radio world where we now see 4G systems supporting data speeds of up to 200Mbps. The approach relies on the use of phase-amplitude and polarisation keying to wring out a data capacity close to the theoretical Shannon limit. Optical systems of 100Gpbs per wavelength are now a commodity in the optical marketplace and 400G systems are coming on stream. It’s likely that we will see Terabit optical systems in the coming years using high density phase amplitude modulation coupled with custom-trained digital signal processing. As with other optical systems it’s also likely that we’ll see the price per unit of bandwidth on these systems plummet as the production volumes increase. In today’s world communications capacity is an abundant resource, and that abundance gives us a fresh perspective on network architectures. 5G What about radio systems? Is 5G an “emerging technology”? It’s my opinion that that 5G is not all that different from 4G. The real change was shifting from circuit tunnelling using PPP sessions to a native IP packet forwarding system, and that was the major change from 3G to 4G. 5G looks much the same as 4G, and the basic difference is the upward shift in radio frequencies for 5G. Initial 5G deployments use 3.8Ghz carriers, but the intention is to head into the millimetre wave band of 24Ghz to 84Ghz. This is a mixed blessing in that higher carrier frequencies can assign larger frequency blocks and therefore increase carrying capacity of the radio network, but at the same time the higher frequencies use shorter wavelengths and these millimetre-sized shorter wavelengths behave more like light than radio. At higher frequencies the radio signal is readily obstructed by buildings, walls, trees and other larger objects, and to compensate for this any service deployment requires a significantly higher population of base stations to achieve the same coverage. Beyond the hype it’s not clear if there is a sound sustainable economic model of millimetre wave band 5G services. For those reasons I’m going to put 5G at the bottom of the list of important emerging technologies. Radio and mobile services will remain incredibly important services in the Internet, but 5G represents no radical change in the manner of use of these systems beyond the well-established 4G technology. IPv6 It seems odd to consider IPv6 as an “emerging technology” in 2020. The first specification of IPv6, RFC1883, was published in 1995, which makes it a 25-year-old technology. But it does seem that after many years of indecision and even outright denial, the IPv4 exhaustion issues are finally driving deployment decisions and these days one quarter of the Internet’s user devices use IPv6. This number will inexorably rise. It’s hard to say how long it will take for the other three quarters, but the conclusion looks pretty inevitable. If the definition of “emerging” is one of large-scale increases in adoption in the coming years, then IPv6 certainly appears to fit that characterisation, despite its already quite venerable age! I just hope that we will work out a better answer to the ongoing issues with IPv6 Extension Headers, particularly in relation to packet fragmentation before we get to the point of having to rely on IPv6-only service environments. BBR Google’s Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip time TCP control algorithm (BBR) is a revolutionary control algorithm that is in my mind equal in importance to TCP itself. This transport algorithm redefines the relationship between end hosts, network buffers and speed and allows end systems to efficiently consume available network capacity at multi-gigabit speeds without being hampered by poorly designed active packet switching elements. Loss-based congestion control algorithms have served us well in the past but these days, as we contemplate end-to-end speeds of hundreds of gigabits per second, such conservative loss-based system control algorithms are impractical. BBR implements an entirely new perspective on both flow control and speed management that attempts to stabilise the flow rate at the same rate as a fair share of available network capacity. This is a technology to watch. QUIC There has been a longstanding tension between applications and networks. In the end-to-end world of TCP the network’s resources are shared across the set of active clients in a manner determined by the clients themselves. This has always been an anathema to network operators, who would prefer to actively manage their network’s resources and provide deterministic service outcomes to customers. To achieve this its common to see various forms of policy-based rate policers in networks, where the ‘signature’ of the packet headers can indicate the application that is generating the traffic which, in turn, generate a policy response. Such measures require visibility on the inner contents of each IP packet, which is conventionally the case with TCP. QUIC is a form of encapsulation that uses a visible outer wrapping of UDP packets and encrypts the inner TCP and content payload. Not only does this approach hide the TCP flow control parameters from the network and the network’s policy engines, it lifts the control of the data flow algorithm away from the common host operating system platform and places it into the hands of each application. This gives greater control to the application, so that the application can adjust its behaviour independent of the platform upon which it is running. In addition, it removes the requirement of a “one size that is equally uncomfortable for all” model of data flow control used in operating system platform-based TCP applications. With QUIC the application itself can tailor its flow control behaviours to optimise the behaviour of the application within the parameters of the current state of the network path. It’s likely that this shift of control from the platform to the application will continue. Applications want greater agility, and greater levels of control over their own behaviours and services. By using a basic UDP substrate the host platform’s TCP implementation is bypassed and the application can then operate in a way that is under the complete control of the application. Resolverless DNS I was going to say “DNS over HTTPS” (DoH) but I’m not sure that DoH itself is a particularly novel technology, so I’m not sure it fits into this category of “emerging technologies”. We’ve used HTTPS as a firewall-tunnelling and communication privacy-enhancing technology for almost as long as firewalls and privacy concerns have existed, and software tools that tunnel IP packets in HTTPS sessions are readily available and have been for at least a couple of decades. There is nothing novel there. Putting the DNS into HTTPs is just a minor change to the model of using HTTPS as a universal tunnelling substrate. However, HTTPS itself offers some additional capabilities that plain old DNS over TLS, the secure channel part of HTTPS, cannot intrinsically offer. I’m referring to “server push” technologies in the web. For example, a web page might refer to a custom style page to determine the intended visual setting of the page. Rather than having the client perform another round of DNS resolution and connection establishment to get this style page, the server can simply push this resource to the client along with the page that uses it. From the perspective of HTTP, DNS requests and responses looks like any other data object transactions and pushing a DNS response without a triggering DNS query is, in HTTP terms, little different from, say, pushing a stylesheet. However, in terms of the naming architecture of the Internet this a profound step of major proportions. What if the names were only accessible within the context of a particular web environment, and inaccessible using any other tool, including conventional DNS queries? The Internet can be defined as a coherent single namespace. We can communicate with each other by sending references to resources, i.e. names, and this makes sense only when the resources I refer to by using a particular name is the same resources that you will refer to when you use the same name. It does not matter what application is used and what might be the context of the query for that name, the DNS resolution result is the same. However, when content pushes resolved names to clients it is simple for content to create its own context and environment that is uniquely different to any other name context. There is no longer one coherent name space but many fragmented potentially overlapping name spaces and no clear way to disambiguate potentially conflicting uses of names. The driver behind many emerging technologies is speed, convenience and tailing the environment to match each user. From this perspective resolverless DNS is pretty much inevitable. However, the downside is that the internet loses its common coherence and it’s unclear whether this particular technology will have a positive impact on the Internet or a highly destructive one. I guess that we will see in the coming few years! Quantum Networking In 1936, long before we built the first of the modern day programable computers British mathematician devised a thought experiment of a universal computing machine, and more importantly he classified problems into “computable” problems where a solution was achievable in finite time, and “uncomputable” problems, where a machine will never halt. In some ways we knew even before the first physical computer that there existed a class of problems that were never going to be solved with a computer. Peter Shor performed a similar feat in 1994, devising an algorithm that performs prime factorization in finite time in a yet-to-be built quantum computer. The capabilities (and limitations) of this novel form of mechanical processing were being mapped out long before any such machine had been built. Quantum Computers are an emerging potentially disruptive technology in the computing world. There is also a related emerging technology, Quantum Networking, where quantum bits (qubits) are passed between quantum networks. Like many others I have no particular insight as to whether quantum networking will be an esoteric diversion in the evolution of digital networks or whether it will become the conventional mainstream foundation for tomorrow’s digital services. It’s just too early to tell. Architectural Evolution Why do we still see constant technical evolution? Why aren’t prepared to say “Well that’s job done. Let’s all head to the pub!” I suspect that the pressures to continue to alter the technical platforms of the Internet comes from the evolution of the architecture of the Internet itself. One view of the purpose of the original model of the internet was to connect clients to a service. Now we could have each service run a dedicated access network and a client would need to use a specific network to access a specific service but after trying this in a small way the 1980’s the general reaction was to recoil in horror! So we used the Internet as the universal connection network. As long as all services and servers were connected to this common network, then when a client connected, then they could access any service. In the 1990’s this was a revolutionary step, but as the number of users grew, they outpaced the growth capability of the server model, and the situation became unsustainable. Popular services were a bit like the digital equivalent of a black hole in the network. We needed a different solution and we came up with content distribution networks (CDNs). CDNs use a dedicated network service to maintain a set of equivalent points of service delivery all over the internet. Rather than using a single global network to access any connected service all the client needs is an access network that connects them to the local aggregate CDN access point. The more we use locally accessible services, the less we use the broader network. What does this mean for technologies? One implication is the weakening of the incentives to maintain a single consistent connected Internet. If the majority of digitally delivered services desired by users can be obtained through a purely local access framework then who is left to pay for the considerably higher costs of common global transit to access the small residual set of remote-access only services? Do local-only services need access to globally unique infrastructure elements. NATs are an extreme example of a case in point that local-only services are quite functional with local-only addresses and the proliferation of local use names leads to a similar conclusion. It is difficult to conclude that the pressures for Internet fragmentation increase with the rise of content distribution networks. However, if one looks at fragmentation in the same way as entropy in the physical world, then it requires constant effort to resist fragmentation. Without the constant application of effort to maintain a global system of unique identifiers we appear to move towards networks that only exhibit local scope. Another implication is the rise of specific service scoping in applications. An example of this can be seen in the first deployments of QUIC. QUIC was exclusively used by Google’s Chrome browser when accessing Google web servers. The transport protocol, which was conventionally was placed into the operating system as a common service for applications was lifted up into the application. The old design considerations that supported the use of common set of operating system functions over the use of tailored application functionality no longer apply. With the deployment of more capable end systems and faster networks we are able to construct highly customised applications. Browsers already support many of the functions that we used to associate only with operating systems, and many applications appear to be following this lead. It’s not just a case of wanting finer levels of control over the end user experience, although that is an important consideration, but also a case of each application shielding its behaviour and interactions with the user from other applications, from the host operating system platform and from the network. If the money that drives the Internet is the money derived from knowledge of the end user’s habits and desires, which certainly appears to be the case for Google, Amazon, Facebook and Netflix, and many others, then it would be folly for these applications to expose their knowledge to any third party. Instead of applications that rely on a rich set of services provided by the operating system and the network we are seeing the rise of the paranoid application as the new technology model. These paranoid applications not only minimize their points of external reliance, they attempt to minimise the visibility of their behaviours as well. Change as a Way of Life The pressure of these emerging technologies competing with the incumbent services and infrastructure in the Internet are perhaps the most encouraging sign that the Internet is still alive and is still quite some time away from a slide into obsolescence and irrelevance. We are still changing the basic transmission elements, changing the underlying transport protocols, changing the name and addressing infrastructure and change the models of service delivery. And that’s about the best signal we could have that the Internet is by no means a solved problem and it still poses many important technology challenges. """ Where does this leave the New IP proposal? In my view it’s going nowhere useful. I think it heads to the same fate as a long list of predecessors as yet another rather useless effort to adorn the network with more useless knobs and levers in an increasing desperate attempt to add value to the network that no users are prepared to pay for. The optical world and the efforts of the mobile sector are transforming communications into an abundant undistinguished commodity and such efforts to ration it out in various ways, or adding unnecessary adornments are totally misguided efforts. Applications are no longer being managed by the network. There is little left of any form of cooperation between the network and the application, as the failure of ECN attests. Applications are now hiding their control mechanisms from the network and making fewer and fewer assumptions about the characteristics of the network, as we see with QUIC and BBR. So if all this is a Darwinian process of evolutionary change than it seems to me that the evolutionary attention currently lives in user space as applications on our devices. Networks are just there to carry packets. """ - best regards,

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Re: on-list feminazi scum - douglas lucas
by Douglas Lucas 02 Jun '20

02 Jun '20

Unlike her glossary, Marsh's New Orwellian Dictionary is definitions of doublespeak, i.e. how the authorities use language, not her -- a fact that Punk obviously photoshopped out from Punk's false excerpting earlier. Just got over 800 new twitter followers these past 72 hours, about to break 3000, meanwhile we all know Punk is a bikeshedder https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding#cite_note-phk-bikeshed-1 But I'm too busy swimming in Pussy to waste more time laughing at Punk's boomer inceldom Enjoy this sculpture! http://www.douglaslucas.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Sculpture.jpg Until next time! that 'douglas lucas' guy

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Re: [liberationtech] "The Nine Most Terrifying Words In The English Language", Pre-dates Reagan...
by grarpamp 02 Jun '20

02 Jun '20

On 6/1/20, Robert Mathews (OSIA) <mathews(a)hawaii.edu> wrote: > When parties do not extend the required effort to study and learn from > human history, take active interest and a very personal involvement in > governance, the proper steering of the State, is not possible.... True as that's been attempted, tried, done, and failed thoughout history, including all of today's and tomorrow's democracies. When faced with such repeated proven and assured failures, you must try a completely different new approach... Forget the State, this "governing" business, your wrong desire to insert yourself in rule over other harmless peoples... steer yourself, your own charitable contributions and right actions, teach others to do same, world will be just fine. "Freedom" is the most terrifying word, in all languages. You will never reach it without first developing it within yourself. After a lifetime of unfree programming, most have a long way to go. But you can remove those chains, if you are brave.

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Bejing declares people's war against the US -- China: What WeMust Do, What We Must Not Do
by Zig the N.g 02 Jun '20

02 Jun '20

----- Forwarded message from Gil May <gilmay97(a)gmail.com> ----- From: Gil May <gilmay97(a)gmail.com> Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 09:17:20 +1000 Subject: China: What WeMust Do, What We Must Not Do *China: What We Must Do, What We Must Not Do* *by Gordon G. Chang <https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/author/Gordon+G.+Chang> June 1, 2020 at 5:00 am* <https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16082/china-what-we-must-do> Share*461* <https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16082/china-what-we-must-do> - The truth is that the United States is defending more than just its position in the international system. We are defending the international system itself, the system of treaties, conventions, rules, and norms. - Unfortunately, Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, does not believe in that system. He is trying to impose China's imperial‑era notions of the world. - In short, Chinese rulers believed that they had the mandate of heaven over *tianxia*, meaning "all under heaven." Recently, his pronouncements have become unmistakable. - In the last few months, Xi Jinping has seen an historic opportunity because the United States has been stricken by the disease that China itself has pushed out... What must we do? First, let us talk about what we must *not* do. We must *not* save Chinese communism again. In the past, American presidents, when China has been stressed, had ridden to the rescue of the Chinese state. - On May 13 of last year, Beijing declared a "people's war" on the United States. This means the contest with China is existential. There is going to be one survivor. It is either going to be the Peoples' Republic of China or the United States of America, but not both. - What should we do? In my call for action, there are eight items. First, we need to cut off trade with China. Now, I know a lot of people think we should not do this, or this would be unfortunate. Yes, this is unfortunate, but the point is that China's communism cannot be reformed, so the only way we can protect American society and Americans is to reduce our exposure to China and our great exposure, of course, is trade... we should not be enriching a hostile state with the proceeds of commerce with the United States. - China's Communist Party does not have sovereign immunity.... We have the Global Magnitsky Act. - We need to "rip and replace" all the equipment in our telecom backbone that has been supplied by Huawei Technologies... China has been using that company's equipment to spy on others. We should have no Huawei equipment in our backbone - Also, we should be turfing out even more Chinese journalists. Those "journalists"... work for China's intelligence services. - Unfortunately, China does not believe in comparative advantage, it does not believe in being a responsible member of the international community. Unfortunately, the only thing we can do is what many people think is unthinkable, and that is to cut our ties with China.... We cut our ties until... the Communist Party no longer rules [and] the Chinese people govern themselves.... I believe the Chinese people eventually will get this right. The truth is that the United States is defending more than just its position in the international system. We are defending the international system itself, the system of treaties, conventions, rules, and norms. Unfortunately, Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, does not believe in that system. He is trying to impose China's imperial‑era notions of the world. China has attacked America with coronavirus. At this moment, more than 100,000 <https://www.npr.org/2020/05/27/860508864/we-all-feel-at-risk-100-000-people…> Americans have been killed. We brace ourselves for the deaths to come. Today, I'll do two things. First, I'll talk about the nature of that attack. The second thing, what we must do to protect ourselves. First of all, China is not, as many people will tell you, just a competitor. It is an enemy. China is trying to overthrow the international system, and in that process, it is trying to make you subject to modern-day Chinese emperors. I know this sounds as if it cannot be true, but we must listen to what Chinese leaders say. When we do that, we realize that to defend the American republic and defend our way of life, we are going to have to decouple from China. On May 6, President Donald J. Trump said <https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-says-coronavirus-worse-than-pearl-har…> that China's attack was worse than Pearl Harbor, worse than the World Trade Center. "There's never been an attack like this," he said, and he is right. Most critically, Chinese leaders publicly admitted that the novel coronavirus, the pathogen causing COVID-19, could be transmitted from one human to another on January 20. Yet doctors in Wuhan, the epicenter, were noticing the contagiousness of this virus no later than the second week in December. Beijing knew a few days after that. If Chinese leaders had said nothing during that five‑week period, that would have been grossly irresponsible. What they tried to do, however, was deceive the world into believing that this was not transmissible human-to-human. As a result of that campaign, the World Health Organization (WHO) propagated China's false narrative, especially with that infamous January 14 tweet <https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en>: "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China." At the same time, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China since 2012, pressured countries not to impose travel restrictions or quarantines on arrivals from China. Again, WHO helped China, this time with its January 10 statement opposing these restrictions. What happened was arrivals from China -- when Chinese officials knew this virus was human-to human-transmissible -- turned what should have been an epidemic contained to China into a global pandemic. I don't know what Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, was thinking, but if after having seen what the coronavirus did to cripple China, he decided to cripple other societies to get even, he would have done exactly what in fact he did do. That means there is only one inescapable conclusion. This conclusion is that China maliciously spread this virus around the world, sickening people, killing others. This is the first time in history that one nation has attacked all the others. That is not all. After admitting the human-to-human contagiousness of this disease, Beijing then downplayed it. On January 21, the day after formally admitting <https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coronavirus-outbrea…> the disease's human-to-human transmissibility, Beijing got its propaganda machine in full gear to tell the world that this was less dangerous than SARS. SARS is the 2002‑2003 epidemic that according to the World Health Organization infected 8,096 people across the world, killing 744. By then, on January 21, Chinese officials knew it was much worse than SARS. According to *Der Spiegel*, Germany's intelligence agency, the BND, believes that on January 21 ‑‑ this is the day after China formally admitted human‑to‑human transmissibility of the disease ‑‑ Xi Jinping spoke to Dr. Tedros, the director-general of WHO, and tried to get the organization to hold back information on human‑to‑human transmissibility, as well as to delay declaring a pandemic. Now, WHO denies that this phone conversation between Xi and Tedros took place, but it fits known facts. It also fits what the US intelligence community has been saying, according to various reports. China's actions had consequences. Beijing lulled public health officials around the world, including those in the United States, into not taking actions that they otherwise would have adopted. Democrats and Chinese communists have criticized President Trump for acting too slowly after he imposed the travel restrictions on China on January 31. If that is true, it is only because people on his coronavirus task force were actually listening to what Beijing was saying and making judgments on what they had heard. For instance, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, in her March 31 press briefing said she had seen the data from China and decided that this was no more dangerous than SARS, but realized, after the infections ripped through both Italy and Spain, that she had been deceived by the Chinese. She is not the only one. Dr. Anthony Fauci has also talked in public about how the Chinese misled him. We must impose costs on China. We must impose costs because, first of all, what China did was a crime against all of humanity. We must also impose costs because we need to deter China. This is not going to be the last pathogen generated on Chinese soil. We got to make sure the Chinese leaders do not believe that they can maliciously spread another disease. This means there is going to be friction between China and the United States as we Americans take steps to protect ourselves in the future. Those steps are going to cause arrogant and belligerent Chinese to move against us. We should take a look about how the arrogant and belligerent Chinese indeed view the international system, how they view the world order. You will hear many analysts say that the friction between the United States and China is just another one of these boys-will-be-boys contests in history. The notion is that the United States is jealously protecting its position in the international system fits in with Beijing's narrative that their rise is inevitable and that we are in terminal decline. The truth is that the United States is defending more than just its position in the international system. We are defending the international system itself, the system of treaties, conventions, rules, and norms. Unfortunately, Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, does not believe in that system. He is trying to impose China's imperial‑era notions of the world. In other words, he believes that everyone around the world must acknowledge Chinese rule. In short, Chinese rulers believed that they had the mandate of heaven over *tianxia,* meaning "all under heaven." Xi Jinping has used *tianxia*‑like language for more than a decade. Recently, his pronouncements have become unmistakable. For instance, in his 2017 New Year's message he said, and I quote, "The Chinese have always held that the world is united and all under heaven" -- all under heaven -- "are one family." If this were not enough, his foreign minister, Wang Yi, in September of 2017 wrote an article in *Study Times*, the Central Party School's influential newspaper. Wang Yi wrote that "Xi Jinping thought" ‑‑ "thought" in Communist Party lingo is an important body of ideological work -- "made innovations on and transcended the traditional Western theories of international relations for the past 300 years." If you take 2017 and subtract 300 years, you almost get to 1648. Wang, with his time reference of 300 years, was almost certainly pointing to the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which established the current international system. That system recognizes the sovereignty of different states. Also, when Wang Yi used the word "transcended," he was saying that Xi Jinping does not believe that there should be sovereign states, or at least no more sovereign states than China itself. The trend of Xi Jinping's recent comments is that he doesn't want to live within the international system. He does not even want to adjust it. He wants to overthrow it altogether. This means China once again is a revolutionary state. Now, Xi Jinping, of course, has not had the power to compel others to accept this audacious vision of worldwide Chinese rule. Nonetheless, in the last few months, he has seen an historic opportunity because the United States has been stricken by the disease that China itself has pushed out beyond its borders. What must we do? First, let us talk about what we must *not* do. We must not save Chinese communism again. In the past, American presidents, when China had been stressed, have ridden to the rescue of the Chinese state. In 1972, for instance, Richard Nixon went to a Beijing that had been weakened by more than a half decade of the Cultural Revolution, signaling America's support for China's communism. That is how people in China took that visit. The second time, 1989, George H. W. Bush sent Brent Scowcroft, his secret emissary, to Deng Xiaoping in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre. Again, America was telling the Chinese, "Don't worry about American sanctions, don't worry about what we say in public, we have your back." The third time, 1999, President William Jefferson Clinton signed a trade deal with China – at a time when the Chinese economy, in reality, was contracting. Certainly, China was suffering geopolitical setbacks. That deal was the basis of China's entry into the World Trade Organization. Despite all these saves of Chinese communism, China's communist leaders have remained hostile. We have seen this hostility, especially since the first week of February of this year when the *Global Times*, which is a Communist Party newspaper, and the Chinese foreign ministry have engaged in an inflammatory disinformation campaign against the United States in an attempt to tar the US with all sorts of disease‑related sins. This campaign culminated, reached a high point -- although this campaign is still continuing today -- on March 12th when the foreign ministry went on a Twitter storm. As a part of that Twitter storm, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that coronavirus patient zero was in the United States. In other words, the disease started here. He also suggested that the US Army carried the disease to Wuhan. We were seeing daily stories about how the United States had been spreading the disease around the world. Now, Americans, of course, were taken by surprise by this Twitter storm, but we really should not be -- because on May 13 of last year Beijing declared a "people's war" <https://opinion.huanqiu.com/article/9CaKrnKksZl> on the United States. This means the contest with China is existential. There is going to be one survivor. It is going to be either the Peoples' Republic of China or the United States of America, not both. We have just heard about what we should not be doing. We should not be rescuing Chinese communism. What should we do? In my call for action, there are eight items. First, we need to cut off trade with China. Now, I know a lot of people think we should not do this, or this would be unfortunate. Yes, this is unfortunate, but the point is that China's communism cannot be reformed, so the only way we can protect American society and Americans is to reduce our exposure to China and our great exposure, of course, is trade. In any event, we should not be enriching a hostile state with the proceeds of commerce with the United States. This means, of course, that we need to get our factories off Chinese soil, but especially our pharmaceutical factories. China has been threatening to throw the United States into what it calls "a mighty sea of coronavirus," and it has not been kidding. For instance, we know the Chinese have turned around at least one ship carrying personal protective equipment -- masks, gowns, gloves -- that were on their way to New York hospitals. Moreover, Peter Navarro has said <https://video.foxnews.com/v/6135159896001?playlist_id=3386055101001#sp=show…> China has even nationalized one American factory in China producing those N‑95 masks. China's leadership always talks about how it is not possible for the US and China to "decouple." Now, it is possible. Our job is to make it inevitable. Second thing that we need to do: The administration is well on the way to making sure federal pension money is not invested in China's markets. We also need to make sure that state pension money, and money from individuals, is not put into China's markets. We should not be enriching China with our investments into its equity markets. Third thing, we need to make China pay. Now, many people have sued the Chinese central government. There are class‑action suits in the federal district courts in Florida, Texas, and Nevada. Of course, the Chinese Central Government has sovereign immunity, but there are a number of bills in Congress, including one sponsored by Senator Blackburn and Representative Lance Gooden. There is also another bill sponsored by Tom Cotton and Dan Crenshaw, and these would strip China of sovereign immunity. I believe Josh Hawley, the Senator from Missouri, also has a bill. The State of Missouri, by the way, has sued the Communist Party of China, which is far more important and far richer than the Chinese central government. Guess what? China's Communist Party does not have sovereign immunity. People have also been talking about seizing China's holdings of US Treasury obligations. According to official records, it holds more than a trillion dollars. In reality, it is probably a bit higher than that because China holds US Treasuries through nominees. Of course, China would engage in a vociferous propaganda campaign if we did that. Beijing would say we are repudiating our debt. They would also say we are not responsible members and stewards of the global financial system. They would be wrong, they would be incorrect, but the US might suffer reputational damage. That is why I think we should seize Treasuries, but we should be doing this in connection with the holders and issuers of other major currencies. For instance, the Canadian dollar, the British pound, the European Union's euro, the Swiss franc, the Japanese yen, maybe the Singapore dollar When we act with others, this becomes not a China-versus-US issue but an issue of China versus the world. No one country is going to suffer reputational damage. Of course, Beijing could nationalize American factories in China, but I'm not so sure they're going to do that because China would be hurt far more than we would by that. Remember that China's economy is still in a contraction phase and it is still export‑dominated, which means it needs those factories on its soil. Fourth, with the possibility of the coronavirus escaping from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, we are now thinking about whether China has a biological weapons program in contravention of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention. Right now, we have seen all sorts of circumstantial evidence suggesting lab leak, and we have seen all sorts of circumstantial evidence that the Chinese military has been involved in the cleanup. The Biological Weapons Convention does not have an inspections regime. The item on my action list is that the United States should insist on inspections of China's labs, and if we cannot get inspections we should withdraw from the Convention. I am not saying that the novel coronavirus was a biological weapon. We really do not know. The one thing we do know is that in China's labs, they have been engineering coronaviruses in the past. They have issued scientific papers on this, and what they are doing is extremely risky. Fifth, we should make sure that China does not mess in our elections. China was extremely active in the 2018 midterms. They were concerned about President Trump's tariffs, and they actually did have an effect in electing Democrats to the House of Representatives. We know they are going to do that, or something like that, this time. *The New York Times* a few weeks ago said <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/coronavirus-china-disinforma…> they are trying to sow chaos in the American public square by disseminating false rumors. Sixth, we need to stop China from using its nationals to systematically gather information on our soil. Unfortunately, we have had a series of American presidents who have, for various reasons, either done nothing about China's intelligence operations here, or the actions they took were deliberately ineffective. We know that China's diplomats operate on our soil, sometimes spying, other times in a manner inconsistent with the diplomatic status they have. Also, China's Ministry of State Security agents operate here, freely. We need to "rip and replace" all the equipment in our telecom backbone that has been supplied by Huawei Technologies, China's telecom equipment manufacturer. China has been using that company's equipment to spy on others. We should have no Huawei equipment in our backbone. Also, we should be turfing out even more Chinese journalists. Those "journalists," we know, work for China's intelligence services. We have allowed them to stay on our soil for far too long. Secretary of State Pompeo has expelled many of them, and we need to complete the job. We have to remember that China's 2017 National Intelligence Law requires every Chinese citizen and every Chinese entity to spy if demanded, which means that Chinese nationals on our soil can be under a compulsion to engage in intelligence collection. Seventh, let's remove China from our cable networks and our newsstands. We should not be allowing China to exploit the openness of our system to try to end it. Eighth, and the last, we have to deter China, which right now is engaging in what people in Beijing call "wolf warrior" diplomacy. For instance, we see Xi Jinping, with these threats to invade Taiwan. Since the middle of February, there have been these boat-bumping and other provocative engagements in the South China and East China Seas against almost all of China's sea neighbors. A Chinese diplomat laid the groundwork for taking over Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, and also China has moved to end the autonomy in Hong Kong. China is lashing out, challenging everybody at the same time. This is a Maoist tactic, and it suggests problems inside the Chinese political system. In any event, we know that this is an incredibly dangerous moment for everyone. One final note. Pushed by China, the Trump Administration is moving to an historic rupture with the People's Republic of China. Because of this, we are seeing changes in the five‑decade‑old engagement policy. Those changes are absolutely essential for us because, without them, we cannot be self‑reliant. *Q: As an attorney, do you feel there is any way to hold China accountable, liable for financial compensation to devastated nations ravaged by their actions?* *If so, as a practical matter, exactly how? Are there US companies that were collaborating with Wuhan labs via research responsible for this corona strain?* *Chang*: Great. I should say I haven't practiced law for two decades, and I've given up my bar memberships. I'm more than happy to answer that question, however. First of all, as I mentioned, China does have sovereign immunity. Now, a lot of people will tell you, and this is not an unreasonable argument, that sovereign immunity benefits the US more than any other nation. I do believe the fight with China is existential. To me, it's important that we make China pay. As I said, we can avoid this sovereign immunity issue ‑‑ and which would have some blowback for the US ‑‑ if the plaintiffs sue the Communist Party. Because the Communist Party is not sovereign. In China, there's a clear distinction between the party and the state. The state has sovereign immunity like other countries and other states have, but the party does not. We can go after the party. By the way, the party actually has more control over China's enterprises, which means it should be considered to be the owner of those enterprises. So, it has assets to seize. We talk about China's military. Actually, it is not a state army. It is an army of the Communist Party, which means that if we can find a Chinese plane, or a ship, or whatever, that would be subject to a successful suit in US Court because there's no sovereign immunity and it's a party army. Having said all that, I think where we are going to seize assets will be the Treasuries. We should be working, as mentioned, with our allies and friends so that all countries in the world seize China's assets. That, I think, will work. *Q. Are there US companies that were collaborating with Wuhan labs via research responsible for this corona strain?* *Chang*: I don't think so. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was built with French companies, not American, as far as I know. Of course, the issue here is not corporate support but is US government support. The US has chipped in, most famously, $3.7 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for research on bats. Many people think that the novel coronavirus is derived from a bat. I think part of the reason for the contribution is that the United States thought that experimenting on bat viruses was really too risky to be done in the US, so it decided to let the Chinese do it. That is crazy. If it is too dangerous for us to do it, it's too dangerous for the Chinese to do it, especially because we know that in China's labs ‑‑ although the Wuhan Institute of Virology has a P4 biosafety lab, that is the highest level of safety standards ‑‑ we know that the Chinese do not adhere to those standards. In 2018, State Department teams that visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology came away appalled -- actually I should say alarmed -- because they saw that Chinese technicians were not adhering to safety standards and protocols. Also, we had those *China Daily* pictures. *China Daily* is an official state media publication. They tried to convince the world how safe the Wuhan Institute was so they posted these pictures, and those pictures actually documented broken or bent seals on refrigerators, a real safety problem. We know that that lab was a walking disaster and something was going to happen. Unfortunately, it looks as if it did. Probably the coronavirus was an accidental lab release. *Q: How would you advise key US allies?* *Chang*: I advise every country to cut their trade relations with China because of the danger China poses. The general view I have is that the world just needs to cut relations with China. If it were possible to reform Chinese communism, maybe that would be a worthwhile experiment, but we Americans have tried that for almost a half‑century and it has not worked. As a matter of fact, our engagement of China has produced the opposite of what we wanted. We now have a richer and stronger China, more belligerent, more provocative, more aggressive, and much more dangerous. We have got to reverse what was clearly then, and is certainly clearly now, a misguided policy. *Q: What can we do now to try and protect us from more of these viral attacks?* *Chang*: The less trade and travel we have with China, then the better we are going to be. If there is no Chinese traveler, there would be no global pandemic. There would be no infections outside China. What we are going to have to do is to severely restrict travel from China. We have to do this at least until we get our hands around this issue. Clearly, we have not been able to manage this. We have this notion, and everybody accepts it, at least implicitly, about globalization, comparative advantage, all of these things that have underpinned our modern world. Unfortunately, China does not believe in comparative advantage, it does not believe in being a responsible member of the international community. Unfortunately, the only thing we can do is what many people think is unthinkable, and that is to cut our ties with China. We cut our ties until we feel comfortable dealing with China, which in my mind means that the Communist Party no longer rules, that the Chinese people govern themselves, and then we can get along with them. I believe the Chinese people eventually will get this right. At least at the moment, until they get it right, we have an obligation to our own citizens to cut those links. Because without those links, we are not going to have the next disease. Remember, China produces, especially in southern China, a lot of disease. Most of the world's diseases do come from southern China. This is not some academic question. Unfortunately, the remedy is severe, but I do not know how else we do this because you just cannot cooperate with China. You have got to cut your links. *Q: What might be possible in the way of the US government exposing details on high‑ranking members of the CCP's overseas bank accounts, family dealings, and for instance, how Xi, on a government salary, paid for his daughter's attendance at Harvard.* *The press has covered some of these things, but that is different from official confirmation and surely greater access to such things as bank records.* *Chang*: I think we should just publicize it, and seize the assets of Chinese leaders in the United States. We have the Global Magnitsky Act. These guys, even before the coronavirus episode, were engaging in a crime against humanity with the detention of somewhere between 1.3 and 3 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other peoples of Turkic backgrounds in what China calls Xinjiang, the northwestern part of China. We know that people were dying in those camps because China has been building crematoria. We know that this is an attempt to eliminate a religion, to eliminate ethnic identity. This is very close to genocide. If it is not genocide, it is as bad as what the Third Reich did before the mass extermination of what, 1941? That alone should give us justification for applying the Global Magnitsky Act and just seizing all their assets in this country. As I mentioned, I believe this was a deliberate spread of the coronavirus. More than 100,000 Americans have died. We have the right to do everything we can within our power to protect ourselves and to punish wrongdoers. We may not be able to bring Xi Jinping to The Hague. We may not be able to put him in that prison we have in Florence, Colorado, otherwise known as the Supermax. We may not be able to put him in Guantanamo, but we sure can seize his assets. *Q: Please discuss what we need to do to regain the technology commanding heights, national industrial plan, whole of government, whole of economy, society, Sputnik‑like program.* *Chang*: It is a whole-of-society approach. You go back maybe 10 years, China was not considered to be a tech competitor. Right now, it is ahead in crucial technologies such as, for instance, 5G, the fifth generation of wireless communications, and in quantum communications it has at least a half‑decade lead on us. This is really stunning because this whole theoretical notion of quantum communications was developed by an American, Albert Einstein. For us, this is just Americans not paying attention. It is also, of course, China's stealing. China steals somewhere between $150 to $600 billion of US intellectual property each year, and now, the FBI is warning <https://www.cyberscoop.com/coronavirus-vaccine-china-hacking-dhs-fbi/> that it is trying to steal vaccines and medical‑related information. What China has been able to do, and it is more than just that, it has had determined programs to develop technology. For instance, China has its 13th Five‑Year Plan, which is just about finished. It has the Made in China 2025 Initiative, where medicines and medical equipment comprise one of the 10 sectors that China wants to dominate by the year 2025. These are, for China, a whole-of-society approach toward developing technology. We really need to do the same thing, and we can do it. President John F. Kennedy went to Rice University and said <https://jfk.blogs.archives.gov/2017/09/12/we-choose-to-go-to-the-moon-the-5…>, "We are going to go to the moon." That was a time when the Soviets were well ahead of us. Through federal programs, through cooperation with business, just through everything, we were able to put the first man on the moon. By the way, no other country has left earth orbit, but the Chinese probably are ahead of us in the race to get back to the moon. For us, I think what we are going to have to adopt the whole-of-society approach. The one thing that we should focus on is our universities. We have Chinese students and others taking in ways which are sometimes violative of federal law, sometimes just inconsistent with their status on campus. They have been stealing, downloading entire databases, doing all the rest of this. We need to stop that. I know Chinese students, Chinese professors play a large role in our campuses, but they have also been taking US technology. We need to end that. For me, it means a renewed approach. One of the ways we can stop this is, we have allowed Chinese diplomats and Ministry of State Security agents to surveil Chinese students on campus. That means Chinese students feel really under a compulsion to do what Beijing wants. We are Americans. This is our country. We can get those diplomats out of those campuses, get the Chinese agents off our soil. That is up to us. To me, this is important of course. I'm here because my dad came here as a student in 1945, just before the end of the war. I think we have got a long way to go, to solving what I think is actually the most complex issue we face: what do you do with Chinese students on American campuses? There are no easy solutions, but we need to address this in a much more rigorous way than we have been. We must do all of those things, that means we have a whole-of-society approach. *Q: Pharmaceuticals, how can we best replace the Chinese market? And rare earth strategic elements. Does the US have adequate resources to produce our own? How can we best disconnect from the dependence on the Chinese market?* *Chang*: On rare earths, we have rare earths in our country and our allies' -- most notably, Canada and Australia -- have a lot of rare earths. What we do not have is the refining capacity. Stuff mined in countries other than China is actually shipped to China to be refined. That has occurred because we do not want to suffer the environmental damage caused by refining rare earths, which in the past has really been awful. New technologies, and those that are coming on-stream now, mitigate much of the environmental impact. I think we need to start refining rare earths in North America. If not here, then in Canada, which has huge deposits of many of the rare earths. It is a political decision for us to make, that we decide not to be dependent on China. With regard to pharmaceuticals, Peter Navarro, President Trump's trade adviser, has been talking for weeks about an executive order that would require the federal government to not buy pharmaceuticals from China. That EO has yet to be signed. I think there is intense fighting at the top of the administration: trade groups and pharmaceutical companies have been fighting that executive order. This is something the President needs to do. It is in his power. He can wake up one morning and say to the pharmaceutical companies, "I don't care what you think. This is a national security issue." You remember that on July 21, 2017, President Trump signed that executive order on supply chain robustness. We know on March 24 of this year he talked about what is now called his American independence agenda, which is Americans making things for Americans. Remember, he has the power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to do a lot of stuff, including getting pharmaceutical companies out of China. It's up to him. We should be, I hope, putting pressure on the White House to do what should be done because he is getting a lot of pressure on the other side. President Trump can do this. Now, one other note. I do not do domestic politics, but I have noticed that there is an election this year. That is probably going to slow down the reaction of the president to many of the initiatives I think should be taken, but nonetheless, this is a really critical one. We cannot allow China to make our pharmaceuticals. We should not be relying on any single country to the extent that we are relying on China, but certainly not a hostile regime that threatens to cut off products. Again, this is a question of American political will. *Q: How do we get other countries to join us in this effort? They are already getting blackmailed by China. If they criticize China, it punishes them over trade. Australia dared to join 100 countries asking for an investigation into coronavirus origin.* *China responded by imposing 80% tariffs on Australian agricultural imports. How can we help other countries to stand up to China?* *Chang*: At the World Health Assembly, which just concluded, the resolution for an independent investigation of the origins of the coronavirus actually was sponsored by 144 countries. It passed without objection. This is an investigation which China does not want, although China eventually saw the handwriting on the wall and decided not to oppose it. I think we get to this is a couple of ways. One of them is, the intelligence community, our intelligence community, has a lot of information which is going to throw a light on what China actually did, in terms of spreading the coronavirus. I know that the intelligence community does not like disclosing a lot of this stuff because it compromises sources and methods. Every once in a while, you get an intelligence issue which is so critical to the future of our country. I think that this is one of those where disclosure of information really is important. Once countries know what China did in terms of deliberately spreading this coronavirus, I think it is over for China. With regard to Australia, because Australia was the second country to propose this investigation after we did, China has decided to punish Australia more than any other country, especially with those tariffs on barley. This is one of those cases where we Americans should start buying Australian barley. We have got to show Beijing that we can out-muscle them. Remember, China looks fearsome because it has had economic growth. China right now is in a contraction phase, and it has also got one other huge problem, and that is a lot of its Belt and Road loans to other countries are coming due this year. These countries cannot pay China back, which means China's debt‑trap diplomacy is trapping not just the debtors, but it's trapping China itself. What we should be doing is making sure these countries do not pay back, because this is one way to starve the beast. There are many different ways to do it, cutting off trade, cutting off investments. Those are things we can do, and we can be working with our allies, our friends, and countries that normally are not our friends. They now have an interest in opposing China, so we should be working with them. *Q: To what extent do you consider Xi's position as head of the CCP to be precarious? Might concerns about his own vulnerability have anything to do with his renewed aggressiveness?* *Chang*: That's the question I wish I knew the answer to. There are a number of things that can be said. Of course, China's political system is not transparent. Especially at moments like this, it can be very opaque. I think this is one of those do-or-die moments for Xi Jinping. I mean that literally. You have got to remember, Xi has changed the nature of the Chinese political system. Under Hu Jintao, his predecessor, it was collective, which means a Chinese leader really did not get blamed for things that went wrong. Also, he did not get that much credit: all decisions were essentially made by consensus, especially at the Politburo Standing Committee, but even in the wider Politburo. The Chinese leader did not worry too much about things going bad. Xi Jinping, of course, has taken that consensus system that he inherited at the end of 2012, and he has made it more or less into a one‑person system where he is the one person. Which means, of course, he has the greater accountability that goes along with that great power. Xi Jinping, even before the coronavirus, was having a pretty bad year, in 2019, because he had a stumbling economy. He had problems in Hong Kong. He had some pretty unhappy people in China. What Xi has done is run roughshod over everybody. As long as he can do that, he is safe. You have got to remember, though: people have not forgotten what Xi Jinping has done to them in terms of taking away their power, putting their family members in jail, all the rest of this. They are sort of waiting on the sidelines for an opportunity to strike back. When Xi Jinping stumbles, they will strike back. This is a particularly important time for Xi because what he is trying to do is intimidate the world with this "wolf warrior" diplomacy. If he succeeds, he is golden. If he does not succeed, if the world starts to contain China, starts to reduce relations with Beijing, all the rest of it, he is gone. By gone, I mean, he not only loses his position, he also loses perhaps his freedom, his assets, and maybe even his life. He has taken what was a consensus-driven system and made it like the Maoist political system of the first years of the People's Republic. When people lost political struggles, they not only lost power, they sometimes were executed. Xi Jinping knows what is at stake right now. There are rumors ‑‑ I don't know how much weight to give them ‑‑ that he is not going to get a third term as general secretary at the next Communist Party Congress in 2022. I tend to believe them, but I think that has not yet been determined. What is interesting is that people in Beijing are talking about that. Which means that it probably is an option for the party to ditch Xi Jinping at the next opportunity. We shall see. *Q: Can we analyze some of the pharmaceuticals or even vitamins that come in that possibly show pathogens because of their poor oversight and loose regulations?* *Chang*: The answer is yes. We have had in the past medicines coming from China that have been adulterated. For instance, in the middle of this decade, maybe even earlier, Heparin, the blood thinner, was adulterated. I do not think China would intentionally try to adulterate their vaccines and stuff. Nonetheless, they have had these fake vaccines scandals periodically in China. One not too long ago. We have got to be very concerned. China can actually get to a vaccine before anybody else does if for no other reason that they are willing to cut corners. It is important for us to make sure that whatever China comes up with is not only effective but also safe. Xi Jinping at the World Health Assembly address that he gave a couple of days ago, said he was going to share the vaccine with the world. I am happy if that is the case, but we have to be concerned that what they come up with is probably going to be ineffective or dangerous. The Chinese are not going to test. They are not going to adhere to the same safety protocols that the rest of the world will. We need to be really concerned about what comes out of China in terms of a vaccine. *Gordon G. Chang is the author of* The Coming Collapse of China* and a Gatestone Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow.* *This article is based on a briefing to Gatestone Institute, given on May 20, 2020.* ____________________ 2. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/data?sw=2&token=["cftp","aa74034dba","gmail_fe_200520.12_p2","4xZtFcmMfDU-lL0gGe71dQ\u003d\u003d","7720,7569,6804,7018,7085,7137,7546,7407,7164,7468,7414,7467,7742,7591,7718,7607,7156,6984,7714,7016,7418,7495,7772,7278,7558,7654,7236,7650,7774,7639,7443,7734,7113,7393,6969,7763,7419,7711,7433,6999,7332,7500,7641,6807,7158,7592,7518,7618,7731,7565,7708,7027,7068,7496,7632,7189,7465,7403,7424,6929,7030,7676,7348,7172,7680,7150,7584,7416,7609,7779,7636,6792",1]&dilte=0&mme=0&gme=1&sme=0 ----- End forwarded message -----

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[gilmay97@gmail.com: Queensland [Australia] the Dictatorial State
by Zenaan Harkness 02 Jun '20

02 Jun '20

There ain't much more punk these days then standing your ground in the court and declaring the unlawful, treasonous, corrupt corporation 'without jurisdiction' over you. Of course, getting arrested, put in the clink, and all in front of the Coven's local chapter head Witch, are just bonuses for the awakening punk in training. Awareness is rising muh grits ... awareness is rising. These events have been happening all over Australia, and in America and other places too. When the people are left with little to live for, anarchy of one form or another begins to take hold of their hearts. Our [the lowly ones] own skin in the game is mostly disrespected, ignored, trampled on. It's nice to see a little courage here and there, and below is one such example. Create your world, ----- Forwarded message from Gil May <gilmay97(a)gmail.com> ----- From: Gil May <gilmay97(a)gmail.com> To: reader(a)gmail.com Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 09:05:50 +1000 Subject: Queensland the Dictatorial State Magistrate Jane Bentley By: Novamagic On: 23 May, 2017 https://novamagic.com/magistrate-jane-bentley/ The system is now so rattled that instead of pretending to be honest it now has to come out with overt and open corruption. such is the case of Cairns Magistrate Jane Bentley in hearing a legal argument – hear is not the operative word at all. Read this from the Cairns post and you will see what I mean. [image: image.png] <http://novamagic.com/magistrate-jane-bentley/jane-bentley/>One of the sorriest days in Queensland judicial history played out in the Cairns Magistrates Court on Monday when two Court Protective Officers threw former policeman David Walter, 67, to the floor, handcuffed him and led him off to the watch house. In the long-running saga Walter was hit with bogus charges by the Commonwealth Director of Prosecutions for not including a bird collection in assets when he was forced into bankruptcy by an equally bogus and corrupt federal legal system. He was attempting to defend himself against a corporate system designed to take out any opposition to its satanic objectives. Presiding Magistrate Jane Bentley is a barrister formerly employed by the Queensland Police Service, then with the National Crime Authority. According to witnesses in the public gallery, she was on a mission to derail Walter at any cost. Walter subpoenaed Prime Minister Turnbull, Governor General Peter Cosgrove, Premier Palaszczuk, [image: image.png] <http://novamagic.com/magistrate-jane-bentley/david-walter/>Governor Paul de Jersey(affectionately known within the bureaucracy as ‘Daphne’) and Police Commissioner Ian Stewart to attend and provide certain documents. DPP Prosecutor Berens, agreed with Bentley the subpoenas required 21 days clear notice of service but he claimed they were one day short of the statutory period. The Magistrate obviously had pre-determined the subpoenas invalid, thus the high profile witnesses did not turn up in any case. When beginning his defence at the bar table Bentley gave Walter three minutes to outline his case. After one minute, Bentley, an obviously hostile former DPP employee, talked over the top of him whenever he mentioned the Corporation. “You sit under the corporate symbol of and are a member of Peter Beattie’s corporate ‘my state’ and you have no authority outside of it,” the retired prosecutor told her. “I am a private person not of your Corporation that is registered in Washington DC and you Madam have no authority over any citizen who is not member of a political party. “You are a member of a corporation talking to me as a private person.” Bentley was not going to allow Walter to get his synopsis into the court records, thus becoming a public disclosure of the corporatized government and courts with their own ABN numbers. The Corporation has too much to lose should the already awakening public giant finally discover the treasonous path down which the political parties have led this once prosperous state and nation without its consent. In an increasingly heated exchange between the Magistrate and Walter, he became angry as she kept talking over him in a louder and louder voice, warning she would charge him with contempt if he didn’t back down. Any self-litigant would have reacted in a similar manner when facing such hostility particularly when one observer described the Magistrates Court system as a Roman Catholic tribunal, and a ‘pretend court’ operating under Admiralty rules in which one is unable to mount a defence against bogus charges. In a highly charged address Walter explained the unlawfulness of the tribunal, how Beattie changed the Queensland Constitution in 2001, removing the Queen, and enshrining the public service within the corporation all without a referendum of the people Bentley ordered an adjournment after Walter was trussed like a turkey by court officers, then taken to the caboose for re-education. When Walter reappeared at 11.30 am he stood manacled in the witness box to hear new charges read out by Bentley. Court officers refused his request to loosen the handcuffs which he said were cutting off his circulation. Essentially she was charging him with contempt, ignoring her orders that he shut up, bringing the ‘court’ into disrepute, assaulting court officers, resisting arrest and other alleged, erroneous misdeeds. Reminiscent of a Stasi operation in post-war Germany, Bentley ordered Walter undergo a mental health assessment, a favourite tool of fascist oppressors. She warned the penalty for such terrible misdemeanours was 12 months jail and he “should consider his options” while she was in the driver’s seat as Walter continued to tell her she had no authority over him. The magistrate adjourned the bird cage allegations for several weeks, saying a video trial would probably be arranged to hear the original charge of not including his hobby of keeping birds as an asset. Having an unblemished 37 years service as a Northern Territory police officer and prosecutor, this man, after realising how far society had descended in the race to the bottom, unselfishly assisted citizens across the nation in their war against an unwavering, egregious and avaricious, corporate, partisan system of government. Other than to record all public electronic communications, the corporation has been unable to deal with social media, lest it prematurely start a revolution. For now unblemished information is the only weapon of the masses. ----- End forwarded message -----

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kick da habit - "If she can do it, I can too!" - Two-Year-Old Checks Into Rehab For 'Paw Patrol' Addiction
by Zig the N.g 01 Jun '20

01 Jun '20

Two-Year-Old Checks Into Rehab For 'Paw Patrol' Addiction https://babylonbee.com/news/two-year-old-checks-into-rehab-for-paw-patrol-a… CHARLOTTE, NC—“No job is too big, no pup is too small.” The slogan of the problem-solving team on Nickelodeon’s Paw Patrol carries with it a sense of irony for one of its viewers, two-year-old Madison Gardner. Resisting the desire to watch just one more episode of the cartoon has proved to be too big a job for the toddler. The young girl has realized she would be perfectly content to sit and watch the puppies from Adventure Bay for every waking moment of her life. When asked about the issue, she demonstrated her deep-seated addiction with her response, mindlessly repeating “Paw Troll? Paw Troll?” while twitching violently. ... It's too cute to copy pasta the rest, so you'll just have to imagine the following 5 paragraphs. You know what you need to do... kick your habit - if she can do it, you can too :) [Nuns excluded.]

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